Leveraging a rolling cross-section design in panel studies to investigate police legitimacy
Monica Gerber and Cristóbal Moya
London School of Economics and Political Science
May 22, 2023
Today
The Study
The rolling cross-section design
Assumptions
x
Objetivo 3
Police legitimacy
Police work requires public support to be able to function in a democratic context
Beliefs that the police act in procedurally just ways and are legitimate facilitate compliance and cooperation with authorities
A socially legitimate police force should require little violence to confront opposition
However, the world has seen many cases of violent demonstrations, police violence and human rights violations
Police legitimacy
The Chilean case
Chile’s main police force, the Carabineros, was among the most trusted institutions (Dammert, 2019)
Yet, recent events of corruption and excessive use of force during the social uprising in October 2019 have produced a serious loss of trust
Crisis of legitimacy: proposals of “deep reform” and even the dissolution of the institution
Need to understand relationship between police and citizens in Chile during the next crucial years
The rolling cross-section design
Cross-section: data obtained at a specific point in time
Limited to correlational research
Causal inference needs to consider time as a factor (Kenski et al., 2010)
Rolling cross-sectional designs (RCS) distribute interviewing within a cross-section in a controlled (random) way over time (Johnston & Brady 2002; Kenski et al., 2010)
Total sample is divided into multiple replicates (smaller random samples)
Replicates are assigned to be interviewed at different intervals of times
The rolling cross-section design
Advantages
Time as an opportunity
Can capture naturally-occuring expected and unexpected events
Avoids missatributing effects to the wrong events
Flexibility: information can be divided into different time periods for analysis
Data can be analised as single cross-section, repeated cross-section or aggregated into time series
Little conditioning of participant responses
Disadvantages
Not able to capture individual change
Small sample size to study individual days
Response rates may be lower do to strict protocols to release samples
The rolling cross-section design
Example 1
The rolling cross-section design
Example 2
The rolling cross-section design in the context of a panel design
Panel studies: individuals are interviewed at two or more points in time
Generally better than cross-sectional designs for causal inference (Kenski et al., 2010)
Possible to make inferences about changes in attitudes or behaviours at the individual level (RCS by itself is not able to capture change)